Targ knows his condition and its finality. Yet his final act is a free one: he gives himself consciously and of his free will to the ferromagnetics, in a quasi-existential manner. Targ knows that because he consciously accepts annihilation, he is free to exercise a final act of will, the sole freedom left to humankind at this extreme juncture. He could take the euthanasia drug, like his sister Arva and the other Last Humans, and simply drift into oblivion. Instead, Targ chooses to affirm his terminal humanity, by a willed act, in the face of the ferromagnetic successor: “Il eut un dernier sanglot; la mort entra dans son coeur et, refusant l’euthanasie, il sortit des ruines, il alla s’étendre dans l’oasis, parmi les ferromagnétaux.” (He uttered a final sob; death entered into his heart and, refusing euthanasia, he left the ruins, he went to lie down in the oasis, among the ferromagnetics.)24
These views of Targ’s final heroic act can, however, be subsumed in Rosny’s broader sense of a transhuman act. For in a sense, Targ does not face his end alone after all. In the paragraph immediately preceding his act of giving himself to the ferromagnetics, he offers a short meditation on his personal relationship with Earth’s environment, where humankind’s Earth becomes, one last time, his personal Earth. Indeed, Targ’s final sense of his human condition is an ecological one, in the basic sense of the word as referring to home. His final musings concern neither his personal act nor the terrifying certainty that his species must die with him. The full impact of his situation only comes when he understands that as Last Man, he is also the last living carbon-based life specimen on the planet, and with his passing an entire kingdom of life must pass.
Let us trace the steps whereby Targ comes to his acceptance of this sweeping vision, and to personalizing it as an ecological one, which contextualizes his final act of giving self. Targ has, in a sense, already personalized the entire history of carbon life, in a vast retrospective meditation in which he has reviewed the total evolutionary sweep, beginning with the primal sea and ending with mankind as master of the atom: “Le vainqueur capta jusqu’à la force mystérieuse qui a assemblé les atomes. ‘Cette frénésie même annonçait la mort de la terre . . . la mort de la terre pour notre Règne,’ murmura doucement Targ.” (The conqueror harnessed everything right down to the mysterious force that bound together the atoms. “This frenzy itself announced the death of the Earth . . . the death of the Earth for our Kingdom!” Targ murmured softly.)
If Targ now has his moment of despair, it is despair on an evolutionary scale: “Un frisson secoua sa douleur. Il songea que ce qui subsistait encore de sa chair s’était transmis, sans arrêt, depuis les origines. Quelque chose qui avait vécu dans la mer primitive, sur les limons naissants, dans les marécages, dans les forêts, au sien des savanes, et parmi les cités innombrables de l’homme, ne s’était jamais interrompu jusqu’à lui. . . . Et voilà! Il était le seul homme qui palpait sur la face, redevenue immense, de la terre!” (He shivered in his suffering. He thought that whatever remained now of his flesh had been transmitted, in an unbroken line, since the origin of things. Some thing that had once lived in the primeval sea, on emerging alluvia, in the swamps, in the forests, in the midst of savannas, and among the multitude of man’s cities, had continued unbroken down to him. . . . And here it was, the end! He was the only man whose heart beat on the face of the Earth, once again vast and empty!) With Targ, the culminating species has literally become the last piece of the life form that nurtured that species’ own rise. As such, however, Targ now feels the very opposite of Pascalian alienation. For one last time, Targ finds himself at home among familiar stars, the same stars that have comforted the gaze of the trillions of humans who have preceded him: “La nuit venait. Le firmament montra ces feux charmants qu’avaient connus les yeux de trillions d’hommes. Il ne restait que deux yeux pour les contempler!” (Night fell. The firmament displayed the lovely stars that had shone for the eyes of trillions of men. There remained only two eyes to contemplate them!) Moreover, Targ, in this situation, does more than simply contemplate. He now counts the stars he knows best, his stars. (“Targ dénombra ceux qu’il avait préférés aux autres” [Targ counted out those stars he had preferred to all others].) Finally, at the end of human time, he looks on as the most familiar of mankind’s heavenly bodies rises, “l’astre ruineux . . . l’astre troué, argentin et légendaire” (the star of disasters . . . the star riddled with holes, silvery, the stuff of legend). The Moon has accompanied humankind on its rise and fall, has been its most constant companion. It is at this moment, when Targ is fully in harmony with his ecology—physical and mythical—that he chooses to join the ferromagnetics. It is an act that makes him a willing part of the larger evolutionary process as it unfolds.
But the novella does not end here. Its simple, one-sentence final paragraph clearly suggests that something more has occurred than a terminal, statistically meaningless offering of the last carbon molecules that exist on Earth: “Ensuite, humblement, quelques parcelles de la dernière vie humaine entrèrent dans la Vie Nouvelle.” (Then, humbly, a few small pieces of the last human life entered into the New Life.) This final sentence suggests the possibility of a startling shift of focus from the human to the transhuman. It offers the outline for three important steps in tracing this process. First, the narrator indicates what has happened; second, the narrator suggests why this might have happened; third, the narrator offers a possible speculation on how Targ’s act may have effected the transhuman passage. First, following the temporal adverb ensuite (then), marking movement beyond the human, comes the narrator’s use of the preterite, the tense that designates completed action in the past: entrèrent. The narrator who has followed Targ’s final moments so closely is now, by the logic of the tenses, speaking after the death of the last human. The use of this past tense certainly suggests that what, logically, must now be a posthuman entity, is at this point speaking to an audience that, because all human life is gone, has to be posthuman as well. Mankind’s story, at least, has passed to a successor life form. Second, the word parcelle points to an interconnected, ecological system of life, a system in which whatever Targ has passed on must continue, in the larger scheme of things, to have a function. In such a system, if individual forms of life perish, life itself continues to change and evolve. Third, the adverb humblement appears to be a sign of empathy on the part of the narrator, this time for what Targ has given, and for his decision to become the vector for now-dead carbon life. This expression of sympathy, responding across the void to Targ’s selfless act, may explain the mechanism that has allowed a special form of information not only to pass into the new life but also to significantly influence its further evolution, indeed the creation of a future intelligence, which in turn is interested in telling and hearing Targ’s story. This mechanism is altruism.
The temporal logic of the narrator’s final sentence is striking. The adverb ensuite (then) indicates a narrative instance that follows Targ’s death. Then, as noted, the preterite entrèrent (entered into) indicates the absolute pastness of human life. The narrator’s use of the preterite is highly significant in this context. Had the narrator chosen the imperfect tense entraient (were entering into), we could perhaps still place the narration before Targ’s death. Targ having lain down among the ferromagnetics, the imperfect verb would depict him not as dead but in the act of dying; and these final words could then be said to represent his dying thoughts, presented in style indirect libre, with the narrator showing such intimate knowledge of Targ’s thoughts that the two voices become almost indistinguishable. The use of the passé simple preterite, however, places narrator and audience beyond Targ, locates them somewhere in a distant evolutionary future. The narrative logic of this verb tense affirms that some significant part of Targ’s “matter” has already passed on to future life forms. At this specific moment, the logic of tenses is clear. If Targ the Last Man is dead, who or what is narrating this final moment? To whom is it being told? A narrator and listener are out there, beyond Targ; and they are clear
ly capable of understanding and sympathizing with his, and humankind’s, final moments.
In both Les Xipéhuz and Un autre monde, a sudden shift of evolutionary perspective takes place in the final paragraph. These final shifts bring about a broader vision, a promise of evolutionary development. The same is true for the last statement of La Mort de la Terre, but the vision here is infinitely more challenging. For humankind is not ascending but perishing, hence forced to imagine what, if any, role human achievements might have in the evolutionary future of life. The contrast with Les Xipéhuz is clear. In that work, Bakhoun meets and defeats a rival species with whom he has no direct communication. The passing of the Xipéhuz is as final as is the total extinction of carbon life here. But to the human reader, Bakhoun’s culminating act, his empathy for the lost species, looks forward to a new vision of life, one capable of condemning the law of survival of the fittest as a cosmic crime against life. The final paragraph of Un autre monde offers a similar leap across evolutionary boundaries. This time the voice is that of the mutant whose “race,” now a physical reality, might in some future time conflict with mankind. Instead, however, the mutant chooses willingly to cooperate with human science, working toward the common exploration of a larger ecological system, one that now widens to include the alternately evolved Moedigen and the possibility that their activities may in fact impact what has now become a common or shared world.
In La Mort de la Terre, the question of evolutionary continuity is more problematic, for here humankind is the dying species that sees its evolutionary progress ruptured forever. In the final sentence, however, after that rupture has occurred, the narrator’s use of the strange word parcelle for the part of Targ that passes into the new life form suggests the presence of an evolving system of life, with which Targ’s seemingly terminal act is interconnected, its past given a future. In contrast, in the earlier passage where Targ’s situation is presented in terms that echo Pascal’s reed, the narrator’s word is particule, which simply means “small part” (petite partie). Particule implies no concern about what the particle is a part of. It is a word, as in la physique des particules (particle physics), that belongs to what Pascal calls the esprit de géometrie, to the world as defined by the mind-matter duality. The word parcelle, in contrast, implies the larger context of what we call today an ecological system. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines it as a “petite partie de quelque chose” (a small part of something). Its use, at this juncture, more than suggests that we are dealing with an ecological vision; it asserts that even in the seeming finality of Targ’s death as particule, he remains, as parcelle, part of a whole. The word signifies both an assemblage of diverse parts and something that, potentially at least, remains a constituent portion of some larger, future whole.25 It is stated that what Targ gives is an element in a dynamic system of events, a system in continuous transformation and evolution.
In order for there to be interconnection, there must be some form of communication between species and life forms in evolution. But what is the agent of such communication? What element makes particules into parcelles? In every case of interspecies conflict or rivalry in these three novellas, an act of what Rosny calls “sympathy” (sympathie) appears to enable some factor—call it a meme, a gene, or something not yet known—to pass from species to species, creating a chain of communication that permits life forms to continue to evolve. Seen in this light, Targ’s situation is different only in degree, with passage now from one kingdom of life to another. Targ’s kingdom finds itself, however, in the situation of the Xipéhuz: another life form is displacing us. Despite this, several times during the narrative, Targ has expressed sympathy with the ferromagnetics, overcoming his bitterness toward his situation: “Parfois, Targ l’exécrait; parfois, une sympathie craintive s’éveillait dans son âme. N’y avait-il pas une analogie mystérieuse, et même une obscure fraternité, entre ces êtres et les hommes? Certes, les deux règnes étaient moins loin l’un de l’autre que chacun ne l’était du minéral inerte. Qui sait si leur consciences, à la longue, ne se seraient pas comprises!” (At times Targ reviled it; at times a fearful sympathy awakened in his soul. Was there not some mysterious analogy, an obscure fraternity even, between these beings and mankind? Certainly, the two kingdoms were closer to each other than either was to the inert mineral world. Who knew whether their forms of consciousness, in time, might not come to understand each other!) Targ’s evolutionary empathy in fact, at one point, stretches beyond even the ferromagnetic rival to embrace what he sees as the endlessly patient, ultimately triumphant, mineral kingdom of life: “A chaque mouvement de la lampe, des éclairs rebondissaient, mystérieux et féeriques. Les innombrables âmes des cristaux s’éveillaient à la lumière. . . . Targ y voyait un reflet de la vie minérale, de cette vie vaste et minuscule, menaçante et profonde, qui avait le dernier mot avec les hommes, que aurait, un jour, le dernier mot avec le règne ferromagnétique.” (At each movement of the lamp, rays bounced around the walls, mysterious and enchanting. The souls of myriad crystals awoke to his light. . . . Targ saw there a reflection of mineral life, of that life form both vast and minuscule, menacing and deep, that had the last word on mankind, that, one day, would have the last word on the ferromagnetic kingdom as well.)
Beyond Targ’s death, however, if there is to be communication, the act of sympathy must come from the other side of the evolutionary divide, in this case from the ferromagnetics. But they, at the time of Targ’s demise, are clearly at a precognitive stage. The question of course arises: Being as we know them to be at present, are they ultimately capable of developing the faculties needed for such an act of “sympathy”? And yet the statement of Rosny’s narrator in the final sentence suggests that some such development has had to take place, otherwise there would be no post-Targ narration. The preterite tense tells us that transfer has occurred, and we may infer that it was brought about by means of some kind of sympathy. We are left, however to speculate on how this might have happened. Rosny’s story, at this point, is an early example of the SF mystery, asking us to take a seemingly impossible event as literal truth and then inviting us to speculate on ways it might have come about. Did Targ’s parcelles contain a code, gene, or other means of transferring information? Did this in turn affect the course of ferromagnetic evolution? Did it provide a factor that determined the creation of a form of consciousness ultimately allowing communication across the gulf of evolutionary time?
Rosny gives us a clue to how the transhuman transfer of evolutionary traits occurred. To follow it, however, the reader must abandon anthropocentric thinking. Anthropocentrism has let other Last Man stories execute a last-minute swerve that saves some part of the human from total annihilation. Narratives from Granville’s Le dernier homme (1803) to recent works including Maurice Blanchot’s Le dernier homme (1957) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (which the French again translate as Le dernier homme; 2004) have deployed the same anthropocentric gambit: at the final moment they allow the last human to escape humankind’s material destiny by moving from history to allegory. The form of fiction that by its very premise abolishes humankind ends by preserving a single human voice, speaking endlessly into the void, as if human consciousness will always exist, and the human voice will always have an audience.26
In contrast, Rosny builds anthropocentrism into his text only to pass beyond it. At one point Targ and Arva, as they contemplate the ferromagnetics, see themselves in the mirror of the future: “C’étaient les vainqueurs. Le temps était devant eux et pour eux, les choses coïncidaient avec leur volonté obscure; un jour, leurs descendants produiraient des pensées admirables et manieraient des énergies merveilleuses.” (They were the conquerors. Time lay before them, was on their side, the way of things coincided with their obscure will; one day, their descendants would produce admirable thoughts, and wield marvelous sources of energy.) In light of Targ’s ultimate sense of physical finality, this vision of a ferromagnetic golden age might appear to be wishful
thinking. Yet what if Targ’s parcelles, as freely given, in fact have transmitted this same message, this same desire for development, across the evolutionary void—might it not have become physical reality in some far-distant future?
Rosny’s narrator has from the outset suggested sympathy with humanity by closely focusing on the thoughts and actions of Targ and the Last Men throughout the telling. There is nothing unusual in this for a narrator this side of Targ’s death. But for the posthuman narrator of the final paragraph, any such expression of sympathy is not only surprising but revealing. Targ, as we know, has given the last elements of his carbon life freely, as a willed gift, in contradistinction to the unwillingness of his fellow humans to give this life at all. Now the narrator makes a comment on the quality of the gift itself, describing the nature of the parcelles as themselves entering “humbly” (humblement) into the New Life. The narrator’s choice of this word, which implies sympathetic judgment of Targ’s act, offers an evolutionary clue that the mechanism that has enabled the transfer of information between life forms is altruism.
At this point, some might object that Rosny’s narrator is simply the conventional omniscient narrator, and that all this discussion of past tense narration and narrative audience after the death of the Last Man is specious. A clear case can be made, however, that Rosny may have seen his narrator as an “evolutionary narrator,” that is, a narrator that speaks for the evolutionary process itself. Such a narrator, by definition, can never be omniscient, because evolution is an always-ongoing, open-ended process. Evidence that Rosny intends to create an evolutionary narrator comes from the carefully controlled change he makes in narrative focus as the story of the Last Men proceeds. The narrator of chapter 1 appears to be the conventional third person narrator—the detached, objective eye recording an important scene (the beginning of the fatal earthquakes) in the drama of the Last Men. Recorded dialogue and general commentary dominate. This is the mise en scène of Targ as principal actor. A sudden rupture occurs in chapter 2, however. All at once, the focus shifts from outside Targ’s mind to the workings of his memory, which contains “the history of the great catastrophes,” the retrospective story that now unfolds: “Depuis cinq siècles, les hommes n’occupaient plus, sur la planète, que des îlots dérisoires.” (For five hundred centuries, men have occupied, on the entire surface of the planet, ridiculously small enclaves.) The narrative focus, now inside Targ’s memory, sweeps back to encompass the story of the gradual fall of humankind and its environment from its industrial apogee to Targ’s own situation. Mirroring this, the narrative tenses undergo their own radical change of focus. For without warning, the narrator seems to abandon history for an act of empathy, modulating its voice from third person, first to the first person plural “nous,” then to a totally unexplained “je,” a first person singular now capable of speaking in the future tense: “Lorsqu’une conscience supérieure se décèlera dans le nouveau règne, je pense qu’elle reflétera surtout cet étrange phenomène.” (Whenever a superior consciousness will be discovered in the new species, I think it will especially reflect this strange phenomenon.) With this shift, the narrator places itself within the community of Last Man (“nous”) and at the same time speaks in a personal voice that says that it both “thinks” and thinks within the broader framework of the future evolution of new species. This narrator will revert to third-person discourse. But its focus, from this moment until Targ’s final act, becomes an increasingly intimate one, a third-person narration that, at the moments Targ meditates on humanity’s past or dreams of things to come, becomes almost indistinguishable from the protagonist’s own speaking voice, in a sort of style indirect libre. The two voices join in an empathy that culminates in Targ’s great visionary dream that itself spans all of carbon life. If we admit on the basis of the past tense of the final sentence that the voice of the narrator now speaks from a time beyond Targ’s death, then the empathy this narrator displays for Targ as he approaches his terminal moment may be an indication that some aspect of the Last Man not only has survived, but may have acted as a force of transformation for the narrating species’ subsequent evolution. Rosny asks us to consider here, on the vaster scale of posthuman destiny, an act of evolutionary altruism expressing the same motivation as Bakhoun’s final invocation. Targ, however, has grown beyond Bakhoun. For Targ is acting for the good not of another competing species but of a new kingdom of life, whose species have not yet been defined by evolutionary process. Targ looks beyond the survival of species to the survival of the principle of Life, even if that means mineral life. Still today, Darwinians ponder the possibility that such acts of selflessness may do more to advance the evolutionary process than adversarial struggle or heroic defiance.27 It is Targ’s final act that sets him apart from the other last humans. This could mean that his genetic, or memetic, material is special among all of surviving carbon life. His altruism may provide the vector whereby this material, given selflessly, is able to pass, effectively, across the evolutionary gulf. If we take the narrator’s posthuman situation as material truth, then it appears that Targ’s gift may have succeeded, where the same material, given reluctantly, or defiantly, might have failed.
Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind Page 9